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Murdoch To Google: I Must Block You (Wait For It …)

Rupert Murdoch has made this kind of noise before (and he gets wrong the extent of actual public access to Wall Street Journal content online, which is 100%). But in an interview with Sky News the News Corp chairman sounds a lot like he would be inclined to take up Google on its oft-repeated suggestion — to all old media titans who think they are being ripped off — to programatically withhold content from the search giant’s massive gene pool of news links.

Many newspaper executives grumble that the internet’s link economy is to blame. But we’ll believe that New Corp intends privatize all of its digital content when we see it. This just might be Murdoch’s way of goading competitors to beat him to a punch he never intends to throw. Nevertheless, he talks the talk very well.

“We’d rather have fewer people coming to our web sites — but paying,” Murdoch tells Sky News Australia, explaining that “the fact is, there isn’t enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the websites profitable.”

The Journal‘s online presence, wsj.com, has always been behind a paywall, with some exceptions (apart from the big one we referred to above and will explain below). News Corp has extended the model to mobile by retroactively bring their smartphone apps in line with online experience — that is to say, subscribers have full access, and non-subscribers have only some. In fairness, this approach is not even all that Draconian: the Financial Times is entirely behind a online paywall and their iPhone app is crippled to only 10 stories per month without a separate subscription fee (full disclosure: I am a both a Wall Street Journal and Financial Times subscriber with full access to all their content on every digital platform.)